The ‘bhodroshomaj’ that is killing women and girls

The Egyptian Arab Spring began with demonstrations across the country, participated by working-class youths, including women who voiced out against sexual violence and harassment, connecting the culture of impunity to Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship. Yet, in real time, we witnessed the hijacking of the entire movement by the religious right. Seeing the July-August movement, an Egyptian friend who was part of the Arab Spring, disillusioned but sincere, hoped that the same would not happen in Bangladesh.

Even with my own optimism, I had told him that we had been an Iranian Revolution in the making for a long time—but yes, time would tell. Not much time was needed for the story to unfold. We are a "wonderful" mix of the Iranian Revolution and Arab Spring—where class, religion, and national politics are played out on women's and female children's bodies.



The battle for women's basic safety and dignity, fought on the streets, is not a momentary reaction but a litmus test for Bangladesh's national outlook for decades to come. From the neighbourhood bully "uncle" allegedly assaulting a young woman for publicly smoking, to gang rapes across the country; from tawhidi janata demanding the release of a harasser, to the death an eight-year-old girl who succumbed to her injuries after being allegedly gang-raped by her male family members—there seems to be no safe corner left for Bangladesh's women. After a week of convoluted and factually incorrect statements by the home affairs adviser, met with fierce protests, the interim government finally initiated steps to arrest the alleged perpetrators.

It is disappointing, to say the least, to witness the sluggish response of a cabinet comprising members who built their careers on "women's empowerment." There is greater fervour in finding "fascists," shifting blame onto the previous government's failures than in addressing today's gendered horrors. The AL government often blamed everything on the BNP and the general "anti-Ekattor er chetona/razakars.

" The blame-game narrative remains unchanged. An excellent body of work has emerged on the culture of misogyny and impunity, in the face of growing religious conservatism. However, an important piece of the puzzle is still missing from these analyses: why, globally, Bangladesh continues to be one of the most unsafe countries for women when its national success was achieved on women's backs.

I would, therefore, argue for a critical class analysis of gender and violence, which is often simplified as a rights and development issue or reduced to a general description of shame/honour culture. Critical class analysis is understudied in Bangladesh's academia, yet class struggle lies at the core of gender-politics-violence. Returning to Iran and Egypt, we saw how, as a reaction against the morally and financially corrupt autocratic regimes, religious conservatism rose within the middle and lower-middle income groups.

Along with financial corruption, autocrats concentrate power through fearmongering and social gatekeeping, preventing socio-economic mobility and leading to class tensions. In such contexts, controlling women's bodies and sexuality becomes pivotal to class struggle, which is usually watered down as a mere progressive vs fundamentalist dichotomy. Partha Chatterjee's critique of the "bhodrolokshomaj" —the respectability class of Bengal Renaissance—argued for Indian sovereignty on two important points: (a) the scientific prowess of the "native" educated elite, at par with their British colonisers; and (b) the Indian moral superiority, embodied in the propriety and spirituality of Indian women (Chatterjee, 1994).

The mark of modernity was to pursue scientific knowledge, including the "allowance" of women's education, while ensuring their spiritual and physical virtue (e.g. Begum Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain, the women of the Tagore household).

When it came to practices of gendered propriety— zenana/purdah , marriage as the sole option for women, Sita-esque purity imposition—Hindu and Muslim men were united (Hoek, 2013; Lal, 2005). Indian feminists have shown that South Asia's decolonial movement was primarily an exchange of power between colonial and elite native men, leaving the subaltern—mainly women and lower caste-class groups—out of decision-making (Chatterji, 2007). Colonial administrative, legislative, and judicial systems, based on European puritanical and racist beliefs regarding gender and sexuality, form the basis of post-independence state-building (Baxi, 2013; Karim, 2012; Menon, 2000; Siddiqui, 2024).

The Penal Code, 1860 and Evidence Act, 1872 systemically established two simultaneous notions: (a) that native women are "habitual liars" and not to be trusted, and (b) that to charge a man with rape, it must be proved beyond doubt, making the woman's "character" central in sexual assault cases (Baxi, 2013). This is reflected in the infamous two-finger/virginity test, which, despite being repealed (2014) and banned (2018) by the High Court (Hossain, 2016; Huda, 2022), is still practised in medico-legal examinations (Siddiqui, 2024). Although the colonial penal system has been reformed, it lacks a fundamental overhaul to ensure restorative justice.

Even the special law Nari O Shishu Nirjatan Daman Ain, 2000, focuses on protecting women's honour to prevent violence. Research shows that this law is often abused, and in authentic cases, the system fails survivors (Ibid). Having conducted ethnographic research on the medico-legal procedures of sexual violence in Bangladesh, I frequently encountered the intersection of class and propriety across the board.

Young people, for instance, aspire to achieve class mobility through education, employment and marriage. Across class divisions, marriage still remains significantly important as men attain "manhood" status and women uphold familial status through it. In a society where marriage is the only socially acceptable rite of passage for women, virginity or its perception is a powerful social capital to attain class and respectability (hence high child marriage rates) (Siddiqi, 2005; Siddiqui, 2024).

From professional women's rights work to supporting divorcees, I can firmly state that it is a common misconception that only economically disenfranchised women stay in violent marriages. In fact, the middle class and above prolong unhealthy marriages ("biye tikano") for fear of losing social and economic status, allowing male violence and questionable behaviours to continue. Irrespective of gender, I found service providers quite conservative, often letting personal beliefs influence professional duties.

These providers—police, doctors, junior-mid-level government officers, lawyers, NGO workers— are usually first-generation urban residents, part of the "new" middle class, from across Bangladesh. The majority of this group received public or madrasa education, surrounded by a Middle East remittance-driven socio-cultural environment. Religiosity is both a matter of spirituality and strategic social capital building for them, often feeling justified in morally policing others.

For example, similar to female garments workers adopting purdah as survival strategy (Kabeer, 1994), middle-class women adopting hijab practices to access higher education and "respectable" jobs (Huq, 2021). The stakeholders, on the other hand, were part of the "old" middle class which is more of a social status than an economic marker. The elite minority is usually a complex mix of the upper-middle class with the uber-rich, related by blood or marriage.

Religion is also used by many in this category to "socially whiten" financial corruption. Given their power-coopted position, they tend to generalise religious others with colonial, racist undertones, showing little understanding of dynamics outside. The elite class frames women's rights as a development problem rather than a crisis of citizenship.

The donor-driven development sector—with "patchwork developmentalism" —has turned women into apolitical categories— "poor/vulnerable," "RMG workers," "youth," and "victims"—marred with paternalistic language and band-aid solutions. As one of the posters from the recent protests rightfully stated, women are citizens/vote banks only during elections. The rest of the time, they are "cheap" emotional and industrial labour that keep the home and national economies running.

The result of both—the conservative economic middle class and the progressive (classist) elites—is the perpetuation of structural violence through familial and state systems. In the absence of critical discourse on marriage-class-sexuality, patriarchal relations, i.e.

kinship, to a man remain the primary option for accessing resources for women. Men have no incentive to question or destabilise their own power hierarchies and women are co-opted into violent structures. This is why known sex offenders and assaulters, without facing any consequences, continue to be celebrated for the respective positions they hold in society.

This is why we use passive terms such as "violence against women" or "gender-based violence" rather than the active voice: "men assaulting women," or "men raping girls." This is why madrasa teachers can hide behind "but the devil made me do it" narratives, gaining sympathy from their peers. This is what delays policymakers in taking immediate actions and prioritising the issue as a national crisis.

This is also why women across class divide perpetuate violent kinship structures, protect the men in their lives, and morally police one another. Socio-cultural and political realms of Bangladesh do not view women as viable, political, active citizens who deserve not just rights, but the dignity to live our lives on our own terms. The male protestors of the anti-discrimination student movement welcomed their female peers when they stood as shields before them.

Like all things with women in Bangladesh, once their presence was utilised fully, they were pushed to the sideline. Undoubtedly, there has been an unprecedented rise in male violence against women but the patriarchal culture of impunity, and undermining women as anything other than industrial or reproductive labour, is also nothing new. The "bhodroshomaj" has been killing us for a long time.

As long as we continue to function within Victorian patriarchal political and legal structures that, by design, are to ensure male domination, we will remain as subjects, not citizens, in our own country. The question is: do we keep taking to the street every time a gruesome rape happens and settle with little band-aid solutions, or do we rip it all apart and demand a social upheaval where women are no longer apolitical categories but political citizens with dignity? References Baxi, P. (2013).

Public Secrets of Law. Oxford University Press. Chatterji, J.

(2007). The Spoils of Partition. Cambridge University Press.

Hoek, L. (2013). Cut-Pieces.

Columbia University Press. Hossain, S. (2016).

Public interest litigation on violence against women in Bangladesh: Possibilities and limits. In A. Barrow & J.

L. Chia (Eds.), Gender, Violence and the State in Asia.

Routledge. Huda, T. (2022).

"No signs of rape": corroboration, resistance and the science of disbelief in the medico-legal jurisprudence of Bangladesh. Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, 29(2). Huq, S.

(2021). Seeking certainty, security and spirituality: religious conditioning and everyday aspirations amongst female university students in Bangladesh. Contemporary South Asia, 29(2), 257–270.

Kabeer, N. (1994). Women's Labor in the Bangladesh Garment Industry: Choice and Constraints.

In C. F. El-Solh & J.

Mabro (Eds.), Muslim Women's Choices (1st ed.).

Routledge. Karim, S. (2012).

Living Sexualities: Negotiating Heteronormativity in Middle Class Bangladesh. ISS. Lal, R.

(2005). Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (1st ed.).

Cambridge University Press. Menon, N. (2000).

Embodying the Self: Feminism, Sexual Violence and the Law. In P. Chatterjee & P.

Jaganathan (Eds.), Community: Gender and Violence, Subaltern Studies XI (pp. 66–105).

Ravi Dayal. Siddiqi, D. (2005).

Of Consent and Contradiction: Forced Marriages in Bangladesh. In L. Welchman & S.

Hossain (Eds.), "Honour": Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women (pp. 282–307).

Siddiqui, S. (2024). "What's Love Got to Do With It?" A Hospital Ethnography on Sexual Violence Response and Care in Bangladesh [University van Amsterdam].

Shahana Siddiqui, PhD, is medical anthropologist at Universiteit van Amsterdam. Views expressed in this article are the author's own. Follow The Daily Star Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions, commentaries, and analyses by experts and professionals.

To contribute your article or letter to The Daily Star Opinion, see our submission guidelines. The Egyptian Arab Spring began with demonstrations across the country, participated by working-class youths, including women who voiced out against sexual violence and harassment, connecting the culture of impunity to Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship. Yet, in real time, we witnessed the hijacking of the entire movement by the religious right.

Seeing the July-August movement, an Egyptian friend who was part of the Arab Spring, disillusioned but sincere, hoped that the same would not happen in Bangladesh. Even with my own optimism, I had told him that we had been an Iranian Revolution in the making for a long time—but yes, time would tell. Not much time was needed for the story to unfold.

We are a "wonderful" mix of the Iranian Revolution and Arab Spring—where class, religion, and national politics are played out on women's and female children's bodies. The battle for women's basic safety and dignity, fought on the streets, is not a momentary reaction but a litmus test for Bangladesh's national outlook for decades to come. From the neighbourhood bully "uncle" allegedly assaulting a young woman for publicly smoking, to gang rapes across the country; from tawhidi janata demanding the release of a harasser, to the death an eight-year-old girl who succumbed to her injuries after being allegedly gang-raped by her male family members—there seems to be no safe corner left for Bangladesh's women.

After a week of convoluted and factually incorrect statements by the home affairs adviser, met with fierce protests, the interim government finally initiated steps to arrest the alleged perpetrators. It is disappointing, to say the least, to witness the sluggish response of a cabinet comprising members who built their careers on "women's empowerment." There is greater fervour in finding "fascists," shifting blame onto the previous government's failures than in addressing today's gendered horrors.

The AL government often blamed everything on the BNP and the general "anti-Ekattor er chetona/razakars." The blame-game narrative remains unchanged. An excellent body of work has emerged on the culture of misogyny and impunity, in the face of growing religious conservatism.

However, an important piece of the puzzle is still missing from these analyses: why, globally, Bangladesh continues to be one of the most unsafe countries for women when its national success was achieved on women's backs. I would, therefore, argue for a critical class analysis of gender and violence, which is often simplified as a rights and development issue or reduced to a general description of shame/honour culture. Critical class analysis is understudied in Bangladesh's academia, yet class struggle lies at the core of gender-politics-violence.

Returning to Iran and Egypt, we saw how, as a reaction against the morally and financially corrupt autocratic regimes, religious conservatism rose within the middle and lower-middle income groups. Along with financial corruption, autocrats concentrate power through fearmongering and social gatekeeping, preventing socio-economic mobility and leading to class tensions. In such contexts, controlling women's bodies and sexuality becomes pivotal to class struggle, which is usually watered down as a mere progressive vs fundamentalist dichotomy.

Partha Chatterjee's critique of the "bhodrolokshomaj" —the respectability class of Bengal Renaissance—argued for Indian sovereignty on two important points: (a) the scientific prowess of the "native" educated elite, at par with their British colonisers; and (b) the Indian moral superiority, embodied in the propriety and spirituality of Indian women (Chatterjee, 1994). The mark of modernity was to pursue scientific knowledge, including the "allowance" of women's education, while ensuring their spiritual and physical virtue (e.g.

Begum Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain, the women of the Tagore household). When it came to practices of gendered propriety— zenana/purdah , marriage as the sole option for women, Sita-esque purity imposition—Hindu and Muslim men were united (Hoek, 2013; Lal, 2005). Indian feminists have shown that South Asia's decolonial movement was primarily an exchange of power between colonial and elite native men, leaving the subaltern—mainly women and lower caste-class groups—out of decision-making (Chatterji, 2007).

Colonial administrative, legislative, and judicial systems, based on European puritanical and racist beliefs regarding gender and sexuality, form the basis of post-independence state-building (Baxi, 2013; Karim, 2012; Menon, 2000; Siddiqui, 2024). The Penal Code, 1860 and Evidence Act, 1872 systemically established two simultaneous notions: (a) that native women are "habitual liars" and not to be trusted, and (b) that to charge a man with rape, it must be proved beyond doubt, making the woman's "character" central in sexual assault cases (Baxi, 2013). This is reflected in the infamous two-finger/virginity test, which, despite being repealed (2014) and banned (2018) by the High Court (Hossain, 2016; Huda, 2022), is still practised in medico-legal examinations (Siddiqui, 2024).

Although the colonial penal system has been reformed, it lacks a fundamental overhaul to ensure restorative justice. Even the special law Nari O Shishu Nirjatan Daman Ain, 2000, focuses on protecting women's honour to prevent violence. Research shows that this law is often abused, and in authentic cases, the system fails survivors (Ibid).

Having conducted ethnographic research on the medico-legal procedures of sexual violence in Bangladesh, I frequently encountered the intersection of class and propriety across the board. Young people, for instance, aspire to achieve class mobility through education, employment and marriage. Across class divisions, marriage still remains significantly important as men attain "manhood" status and women uphold familial status through it.

In a society where marriage is the only socially acceptable rite of passage for women, virginity or its perception is a powerful social capital to attain class and respectability (hence high child marriage rates) (Siddiqi, 2005; Siddiqui, 2024). From professional women's rights work to supporting divorcees, I can firmly state that it is a common misconception that only economically disenfranchised women stay in violent marriages. In fact, the middle class and above prolong unhealthy marriages ("biye tikano") for fear of losing social and economic status, allowing male violence and questionable behaviours to continue.

Irrespective of gender, I found service providers quite conservative, often letting personal beliefs influence professional duties. These providers—police, doctors, junior-mid-level government officers, lawyers, NGO workers— are usually first-generation urban residents, part of the "new" middle class, from across Bangladesh. The majority of this group received public or madrasa education, surrounded by a Middle East remittance-driven socio-cultural environment.

Religiosity is both a matter of spirituality and strategic social capital building for them, often feeling justified in morally policing others. For example, similar to female garments workers adopting purdah as survival strategy (Kabeer, 1994), middle-class women adopting hijab practices to access higher education and "respectable" jobs (Huq, 2021). The stakeholders, on the other hand, were part of the "old" middle class which is more of a social status than an economic marker.

The elite minority is usually a complex mix of the upper-middle class with the uber-rich, related by blood or marriage. Religion is also used by many in this category to "socially whiten" financial corruption. Given their power-coopted position, they tend to generalise religious others with colonial, racist undertones, showing little understanding of dynamics outside.

The elite class frames women's rights as a development problem rather than a crisis of citizenship. The donor-driven development sector—with "patchwork developmentalism" —has turned women into apolitical categories— "poor/vulnerable," "RMG workers," "youth," and "victims"—marred with paternalistic language and band-aid solutions. As one of the posters from the recent protests rightfully stated, women are citizens/vote banks only during elections.

The rest of the time, they are "cheap" emotional and industrial labour that keep the home and national economies running. The result of both—the conservative economic middle class and the progressive (classist) elites—is the perpetuation of structural violence through familial and state systems. In the absence of critical discourse on marriage-class-sexuality, patriarchal relations, i.

e. kinship, to a man remain the primary option for accessing resources for women. Men have no incentive to question or destabilise their own power hierarchies and women are co-opted into violent structures.

This is why known sex offenders and assaulters, without facing any consequences, continue to be celebrated for the respective positions they hold in society. This is why we use passive terms such as "violence against women" or "gender-based violence" rather than the active voice: "men assaulting women," or "men raping girls." This is why madrasa teachers can hide behind "but the devil made me do it" narratives, gaining sympathy from their peers.

This is what delays policymakers in taking immediate actions and prioritising the issue as a national crisis. This is also why women across class divide perpetuate violent kinship structures, protect the men in their lives, and morally police one another. Socio-cultural and political realms of Bangladesh do not view women as viable, political, active citizens who deserve not just rights, but the dignity to live our lives on our own terms.

The male protestors of the anti-discrimination student movement welcomed their female peers when they stood as shields before them. Like all things with women in Bangladesh, once their presence was utilised fully, they were pushed to the sideline. Undoubtedly, there has been an unprecedented rise in male violence against women but the patriarchal culture of impunity, and undermining women as anything other than industrial or reproductive labour, is also nothing new.

The "bhodroshomaj" has been killing us for a long time. As long as we continue to function within Victorian patriarchal political and legal structures that, by design, are to ensure male domination, we will remain as subjects, not citizens, in our own country. The question is: do we keep taking to the street every time a gruesome rape happens and settle with little band-aid solutions, or do we rip it all apart and demand a social upheaval where women are no longer apolitical categories but political citizens with dignity? References Baxi, P.

(2013). Public Secrets of Law. Oxford University Press.

Chatterji, J. (2007). The Spoils of Partition.

Cambridge University Press. Hoek, L. (2013).

Cut-Pieces. Columbia University Press. Hossain, S.

(2016). Public interest litigation on violence against women in Bangladesh: Possibilities and limits. In A.

Barrow & J. L. Chia (Eds.

), Gender, Violence and the State in Asia. Routledge. Huda, T.

(2022). "No signs of rape": corroboration, resistance and the science of disbelief in the medico-legal jurisprudence of Bangladesh. Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, 29(2).

Huq, S. (2021). Seeking certainty, security and spirituality: religious conditioning and everyday aspirations amongst female university students in Bangladesh.

Contemporary South Asia, 29(2), 257–270. Kabeer, N. (1994).

Women's Labor in the Bangladesh Garment Industry: Choice and Constraints. In C. F.

El-Solh & J. Mabro (Eds.), Muslim Women's Choices (1st ed.

). Routledge. Karim, S.

(2012). Living Sexualities: Negotiating Heteronormativity in Middle Class Bangladesh. ISS.

Lal, R. (2005). Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (1st ed.

). Cambridge University Press. Menon, N.

(2000). Embodying the Self: Feminism, Sexual Violence and the Law. In P.

Chatterjee & P. Jaganathan (Eds.), Community: Gender and Violence, Subaltern Studies XI (pp.

66–105). Ravi Dayal. Siddiqi, D.

(2005). Of Consent and Contradiction: Forced Marriages in Bangladesh. In L.

Welchman & S. Hossain (Eds.), "Honour": Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women (pp.

282–307). Siddiqui, S. (2024).

"What's Love Got to Do With It?" A Hospital Ethnography on Sexual Violence Response and Care in Bangladesh [University van Amsterdam]. Shahana Siddiqui, PhD, is medical anthropologist at Universiteit van Amsterdam. Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

Follow The Daily Star Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions, commentaries, and analyses by experts and professionals. To contribute your article or letter to The Daily Star Opinion, see our submission guidelines..